ndes.
Modern expansionists are railroad builders. Witness the long list of
strategic lines, constructed or subsidized by various governments during
the past half century--the Union Pacific, Central Pacific, Canadian
Pacific, Trans-Siberian, Cairo-Khartoum, Cape Town-Zambesi, and now the
proposed Trans-Saharan road, designed to unite the Mediterranean and
Guinea colonies of French Africa. The equipment of the American roads,
with their heavy rails, giant locomotives, and enormous freight cars,
reveals adaptation to a commerce that covers long distances between
strongly differentiated areas of production, and that reflects the vast
enterprises of this continental country. The same story comes out in the
ocean vessels which serve the trade of the Great Lakes, and in the acres
of coal barges in a single fleet which are towed down the Ohio and
Mississippi by one mammoth steel tug.

[Sidenote: Practical bent of colonials.]

The abundant natural resources awaiting development in such big new
countries give to the mind of the people an essentially practical bent.
The rewards of labor are so great that the stimulus to effort is
irresistible. Economic questions take precedence of all others, divide
political parties, and consume a large portion of national legislation;
while purely political questions sink into the background. Civilization
takes on a material stamp, becomes that "dollar civilization" which is
the scorn of the placid, paralyzed Oriental or the old world European.
The genius of colonials is essentially practical. Impatience of
obstacles, short cuts aiming at quick returns, wastefulness of land, of
forests, of fuel, of everything but labor, have long characterized
American activities. The problem of an inadequate labor supply attended
the sudden accession of territory opened for European occupation by the
discovery of America, and caused a sudden recrudescence of slavery,
which as an industrial system had long been outgrown by Europe. It has
also given immense stimulus to invention, and to the formation of labor
unions, which in the newest colonial fields, like Australia and New
Zealand, have dominated the government and given a Utopian stamp to
legislation.

Yet underlying and permeating this materialism is a youthful idealism.
Transplanted to conditions of greater opportunity, the race becomes
rejuvenated, abandons outgrown customs and outworn standards,
experiences an enlargement of vision and of hope, gathers